Little Miss Flint Announces Her Own #BlackPantherChallenge GoFundMe

"Little Miss Flint" Mari Copeny, 8, poses during an event at Northwestern High School in Flint, Michigan, May 4, 2016, where US President Barack Obama met with locals for a neighborhood roundtable on the drinking water crisis.Copeny wrote to the president before she traveling 12 hours by bus with more than 200 Flint residents to a congressional hearing on the city's water crisis. / AFP / Jim Watson (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)JIM WATSON

It's safe to say that a lot of people are going to see Black Panther when it hits theaters February 17. And people are already paying the tickets forward, by helping other people get their tickets, too.

Following the news in mid-January that a man named Frederick Joseph set up a GoFundMe to raise enough money to bring a group of Harlem schoolchildren to a Black Panther screening, a new social media challenge quickly emerged. Frederick's desire to have as many young children of color as possible see a movie wherein the black characters are the heroes of the story created the #BlackPantherChallenge, The Root reports. In the wake of this challenge's creation, similar GoFundMe pages and fundraising campaigns have sprung up in the same vein.

Now, Little Miss Flint, Mari Copeny, and her cousin, Felicia Copeny, are mobilizing for the residents of Flint, Michigan. Over on GoFundMe, Felicia has created the Help Flint Kids See Black Panther page. "This campaign is a part of the #BlackPantherChallenge," Felicia writes, adding that "[i]t is so important that marginalized children see a representation of themselves, especially in a city like Flint, Michigan where the kids only see themselves in the media as victims of our cities water crisis."

Felicia and Mari hope to raise enough money to take 100 Flint-area children to see Black Panther when it opens later this month, but it sounds like they're open to bringing as many children as they can provide tickets for. As she notes, "We would like to take as many children as we can to see people that look like them as superheroes, warriors, and royalty."

Happily, Felicia and Mari are not the only ones who are working hard to make sure this film is seen by those who deserve to see it the most. Time reports that, earlier this week, Octavia Spencer posted a photo from Black Panther to her Instagram, writing, "I will be in [Mississippi] when this movie opens. I think I will buy out a theatre in an underserved community there to ensure that all our brown children can see themselves as a superhero." She added, "I will let you know where and when." The actress previously hosted a similar screening for her movie, Hidden Figures so that low-income families could enjoy the movie about three groundbreaking black women working at NASA in the 1960s.